🍷 8,625 gallons of Dry Creek Valley Cabernet, with room to talk. As harvest activity ramps up, not every winery need has to be solved with another fruit contract. New on the WIN Marketplace is 2025 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon bulk wine from Lytton Manor Vineyard, with 8,625 gallons available. The wine is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, currently stored at Redwood Valley Cellars, and the seller says samples are available, pricing is negotiable, and they’ll entertain buyers looking for a range of quantities. The vineyard sits between Ridge’s Lytton Springs East and West vineyards, and the seller describes the wine as showing deeply extracted fruit, dark berry character, pronounced tannic structure, and expressive aromatics. Minimal oak was used with the goal of rounding the finish rather than creating a pronounced oak impression. The wine is listed at 13.3% ABV, 3.71 pH, and 5.80 g/L TA. For wineries evaluating Cabernet needs beyond the incoming vintage, this is a sizable Dry Creek Val

Ulrich Willmes The Press as a “Quality Gate” Ten Practical Rules for Preserving the Grapes’ Potential in the Must The press is the critical juncture between vineyard and cellar. It is where it becomes clear how much of the grapes’ quality potential actually reaches the must. Anyone seeking to work in the premium segment with as few corrective interventions and additives as possible—and anyone aiming to produce wine as cost-effectively as possible—must plan precisely before the first pressure stage. Pressing Does Not Begin in the Press House Pressing is not an isolated machine operation. The condition of the grapes, harvest timing, outdoor temperature, weather, transport containers, waiting time, and route to the press collectively determine the quality that can ultimately be extracted. Even a good press cannot turn damaged, overheated, or microbiologically compromised grapes back into intact fruit. The most important practical consequence is this: The vineyard, harvest logis

There is, for good reason, a lot of reporting right now on climate change and how it's affecting the grape harvest. Everywhere you look, wine regions are experiencing harsher-than-normal conditions. It would be easy to write a post about how hot it is and stop there. But, I want to pick out something else: this is a story of climate volatility, not just heat. A Cold Night in Bigfork, Montana This hit home for me in 2022, when I was asked to evaluate a future winery, and existing vineyard in the Bigfork area of Montana. Two years earlier, in 2020, the growing season had been warm, and the owners felt good about what climate change might mean for grape growing that far north. But, climate change isn't just hotter weather. It's climate volatility. In that same warm year, Montana got a sudden, early, catastrophic cold event. The weather through September and into early October 2020 stayed mild, highs in the mid-50s, with only two nights that dipped to freezing. Because of that, most of the

Developed through a German research initiative with Fraunhofer IOSB, Armbruster Kelterei Technology and Geisenheim University, GrapeSort brings advanced sensor-based sorting into the winery processing line. Exceptional wine quality starts with the fruit. During harvest, wineries have only a limited time window to remove leaves, insects, stems, mold-affected berries, damaged fruit or berries outside the desired degree of ripeness - without slowing down production or losing valuable grapes. Developed in partnership with Germany’s renowned research institutions Fraunhofer IOSB and Geisenheim University, Armbruster Kelterei Technology pioneered optical grape sorting based on quality and ripeness parameters. The resulting GrapeSort system seamlessly integrates into the processing line, using fully automated optical sorting technology to ensure that only grapes of the desired quality proceed to the next stage of production rather than relying solely on manual inspection. After destemming

In Napa, the difference between a good vintage and a stressed one can come down to a single afternoon. A forecast calls for temperatures in the 90s, then the thermometer climbs past 100. For a grower, those hours matter, and the ability to respond quickly can protect both the crop and the quality of the season. For Roy Chapin, owner and winemaker at 4 Winds Winery, that kind of responsiveness has become part of how he farms. Roy has spent years producing high-quality wines with a focus on sustainable practices, always working to balance vine health against careful water use. Like many Napa growers, his challenge was not a lack of effort or experience. It was visibility, knowing what was happening across the vineyard in real time, and being able to act on it without losing precious hours. Seeing the vineyard from anywhere That visibility is what changed when Roy integrated WiseConn into his operation. "WiseConn gives me the ability to monitor and control my irrigation remotely, which is

By Laurie Millotte, Founder, Outshinery At Outshinery, we render winery product images. No cameras, no shipped bottles. Photorealistic 3D images of your wine, built from the label file, ready before the wine is even in the bottle. We have made images for more than 2,000 brands across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. After that many bottles, you start to see patterns. The same five mistakes show up on winery product pages over and over, regardless of region or size. None of them are about the wine. They are about how the bottle is presented on screen. That matters more than it used to. Direct-to-consumer wine shipments fell a record 15% in volume in 2025, the steepest decline since the channel began tracking in 2010 (Sovos ShipCompliant). The brands holding ground are the ones whose product pages read instantly at thumbnail size on a phone. Here are the five mistakes, and the fix for each. Mistake 1: Your Library Looks Like Five Different Brands Five years of vendors. Three photog

The weather is shifting, trip-planning season is underway, and tasting room traffic is about to pick up. This is the good news. The bad news? If you're reading this and thinking "we'll get to our spring marketing when spring gets here," you're behind. The tasting rooms that stay full from April through June aren't the ones with the best wine or the prettiest views. They're the ones that showed up in someone's planning process three weeks before the trip happened. People don't stumble into wine country on a whim and wander from door to door the way they did fifteen years ago. They research. They scroll. They book. And if your winery isn't visible and compelling during that research window, you're invisible when it counts. The hotel industry figured this out years ago. Marriott doesn't wait until summer to market beach properties. They start running "book your getaway" campaigns in late winter, because they know the booking win

Why Wineries Need Influencer Marketing Now Here's a number that should reshape how you think about marketing: 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations more than information coming directly from a brand That's not a slight edge. That's a fundamental shift in how people decide what to buy. For wineries, this matters more than it does for most industries. Wine is a considered purchase wrapped in uncertainty. Your potential customer is standing in a tasting room or scrolling through an online store, wondering: Will I like this? Is it worth the price? Am I making the right choice? Influencer content answers those questions in ways traditional marketing cannot. When a trusted voice says "I tried this Pinot and it's incredible with grilled salmon," that carries weight. It's a peer recommendation disguised as content. Instagram and TikTok now drive wine discovery among younger audiences, and 87% of Gen Z consumers say they're willing to buy products

A few years ago at the DTC Wine Symposium, a panelist joked about the modern winery website formula: the guy, the dog, the truck, and the vineyard. Beautiful backdrop, strong lifestyle photography, a thoughtful founder story. Polished, absolutely. Strategically distinct, rarely. The critique wasn’t about branding. It was about structure. Most winery websites aren’t broken, but they aren’t built as decision environments either. Calls to action are unclear, revenue pathways are buried, shipping surprises appear late, and wine club often lives in isolation instead of throughout the buying journey. After auditing winery sites across regions and production sizes, the pattern is consistent: performance is constrained by friction, not effort. Most wineries don’t have a traffic problem. They have a conversion architecture problem. Before increasing ad spend or launching another promotion, run a winery website audit — on your phone. Start at the homepage and move t

WineDirect to Commerce7: 19% Growth in Club Customization, 50% Less Support, and the End of "Batch Day" TL;DR: Faced with manual bottlenecks on WineDirect, Hill Family Estate migrated to Commerce7 to empower their members. The results were immediate: a 19% increase in customized club shipments and a 50% reduction in support volume. Most importantly, the team reclaimed 4-5 hours of manual labour per club run by allowing their customers to customize their orders online and move to fully automated background processing.  Founded by third-generation farmer Doug Hill, Hill Family Estate is a family-run operation in Napa Valley that blends deep vineyard expertise with approachable hospitality. Their winery and tasting room experiences are known for being family-friendly, intimate, and deeply rooted in the land they have farmed for decades. For Allison Negrón, DTC Manager at Hill Family Estate, the goal is always to provide a seamless, personali